I am a person online.

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  • 85 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I see. Well, you say you’re “not that serious” about wanting to be a biochemist, but is it still something you want ? Since you also said earlier that you couldn’t commit to something else three more years, to keep going in that track doesn’t seem like a bad option.

    Otherwise, if you find a work project involving one or several of the subjects that interest you, that’d be the other good option.

    I’m a student myself, and I’ve jumped a few times from a study to another, but now I’m committing to physics and I don’t intend to let go. But there’s also a few skills and fields of interest I like learning on the side… That’s not a contradiction, everyone is interested in different things and has a skill set that’s doesn’t depend only ln their work. I intend to be a good amateur artist and an informed layman on several subjects, but physics is what I want to study professionally.

    Committing to something doesn’t mean you should give up on all the rest, just that you should set boundaries on what will be the thing you’ll be an professional in and the rest. Even if you go a different path, don’t think of the time you devoted to biochemistry as wasted time… It’ll have fed your culture and skill set. Maybe it’ll be useful to you, maybe not, but either way it’s not a negative thing. A choice is good if it is a choice you’ve made. And you’re not that late anyway, some have “wasted” more years than that.

    Of course, I’m just a student myself, not a teacher or anything. Beside, I’m French and our university systems might be a bit different, so take it with a grain of salt.














  • I would not recommend Arch for beginners. I like it, but it’s best for someone a bit familiar with Linux already. Yeah, the install is pretty simple now that Archinstall is a thing, but it’s not the method recommended in the Arch Wiki and if there’s something wrong with your install and you complain on the Arch Forum they might not be super helpful.

    More generally, the mood on the Arch forum and Arch communities at large isn’t super beginner friendly, and thay’s understandable: In a distro meant to be user friendly and aimed at general user, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system break, the community will feel a responsibility towards them, because the system wasn’t stable and user-friendly enough. In a distro primarily aimed at power users and devs, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system breaks, then the user is a fool and should’ve read the wiki.

    Because it is a very fast rolling release, some updates can break stuff. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen at a bad time and be a big problem for someone who doesn’t know how to deal with it.

    Debian is more stable, and easier if you go with a D.E, but you still have to make several choices during the install, which might be a bit complicated for a beginner who doesn’t know what any of these options mean… Tho of course, it’s possible to go with all the defaults and it’ll be alright.

    But my prime recommendation would be Linux Mint.



  • In English, I hate both “from where” and the rarer “from whence”. I first found out about the words “whence”, “whither”, “thence” and “thither” (respectively meaning "from where, “towards where”, “from there” and “towards there”) while reading the Lord of the Rings in English. I found these were powerful words that could make many sentences shorter and clearer and that it was a shame they went out of popular use…

    But then, I also heard “from whence”, which struck me as far worse because it was redundant and stripped the word of its power. I first thought it was a mistake, but after seing it several times I looked up how it was meant to be used to see if I wasn’t in the wrong and saw that while it had started as a mistake, it came into use several hundred years ago and was used by many famous classic authors, making it acceptable.

    Imo, that’s probably what killed these words. I guess it had the merit of being less easily misheard, but when “from whence” and “from where” mean the exact same thing, why bother remembering “whence”?

    In my native language, French, I kinda dislike “C’est quoi ?” (Litt. “It’s what ?”, pronounced [sekwa] meaning "What is it ?). It’s a vernacular expression often found incorrect… But I also kinda understand why it exists. The most correct way to ask “what is it” is “Qu’est-ce ?” ([kɛsə] or [kɛs]). It works well when written, but I guess being too short, it can be easily misheard. For example, “caisse” (a large box) is pronounced the exact same way. The other alternative, more common in oral speech is “Qu’est-ce que c’est ?” (litt. “What is it that it is ?”). It might seem too long, but it’s pronounced [kɛskəse], which has the same number of syllables as “What is it”. It is redundant tho, so I understand why “C’est quoi ?”, which doesn’t sound like anything else, rolls off the tongue and has two syllables is winning over, and will probably be the correct way in the future, but it still kinda sounds wrong to me.